Viet
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Bill Powell / June 25, 2014 5:51 AM EDT
Lu would not return from Iraq alive.
In the early morning of November 13, 2004, the “3-5” was going house to house in Fallujah. When one front door jammed, Lu’s fellow Marines called on him to use his bulk and strength as a battering ram. He rammed his shoulder into the door, it popped open, and almost immediately Lu began taking fire from three insurgents inside. He absorbed eight or nine rounds before his unit mates could return fire. He slumped to the floor, mortally wounded. He was 22 years old.
President Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on May 1, 2003.J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The cost to the United States of the Iraq War has been immense: Between 2003 and the end of 2012, 4,486 American servicemen and women were killed. Another 33,000 were wounded. (Before that, in 1991, 382 American military personnel were killed in the first Iraq War, which drove Saddam’s army out of Kuwait, the neighboring oil-rich country to Iraq’s south.)
The toll on Iraqis has been far greater. According to the Iraq Body Count project, an independent research group that tries to monitor casualties, up to 114,731 Iraqis have been killed to date in a war that, for them, continues.
For the United States, the financial cost of the war was also enormous—and it still grows, despite the fact that U.S. troops are no longer there. According to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the U.S. spent $1.7 trillion on the war. That, however, does not include benefits owed to war veterans, including the long-term costs of treating servicemen and women for everything from physical wounds to post-traumatic stress disorder. Add those costs to the total and it comes to almost $2.2 trillion, according to the study.
There are still some associated with the Iraq War who argue it was not a mistake. In a different context, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the phrase “dead enders” to describe those defending the indefensible. Most now accept the obvious: “If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last, and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in,” said Steve Bucci, a former aide to Rumsfeld, last year. “Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought [the war] would be short.”
The consequences of that miscalculation have been enormous, and in many ways may have only just begun. America’s retreat in Vietnam nearly four decades ago begat genocide in Cambodia and an authoritarian, Communist regime in Vietnam that rules to this day. But in the wake of the war, economic growth in east Asia soared, and former authoritarian governments in South Korea and Taiwan became democracies (midwifed, to be sure, by active U.S. diplomacy, but not imposed at the barrel of a gun).
Now, by contrast, the Middle East has descended into chaos, with Al-Qaeda and its radical Sunni offshoots metastasizing and on the march, not just in Iraq but in Syria (where ISIS originated to fight the government of Bashar Assad), Libya and Yemen.
An American soldier screams at a gathering crowd at the scene of an explosion at an illegal petrol station in central Baghdad, May 1, 2003. Moises Saman/Magnum
At the core of that chaos are the sectarian passions cut loose by toppling Saddam. Iraq is now at the center of a lethal Sunni/Shia divide, which sets Iran and its client states in Syria and Lebanon against not only radical groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula but also Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies.
Historians will long debate just how big an opportunity Iraq really did have starting in 2011, when the last of the U.S. troops packed up and headed out. Economically, it is true that there had been some progress. Blessed with massive oil reserves, Iraq had finally begun to exceed prewar production levels. But politically not enough had changed—as al-Maliki demonstrated almost immediately after the U.S. troop withdrawal by moving against high-profile Sunni politicians in his government, men such as Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, for whom an arrest warrant was issued within days of the U.S. troop withdrawal.
The U.S., exhausted and weakened by economic troubles at home, had no patience anymore for the constant head-knocking that Iraq’s politics require. And without a superior power knocking heads together, those politics quickly become lethal.
Lu’s idealistic notion that the Iraqis wanted and deserved freedom may have been true. But two things set Iraq on its current course. One, the U.S. government decided to ignore the detailed plans for what had to happen during the occupation, pulled together by the State Department before the war in the “Future of Iraq” project. Instead, the Bush administration agreed to let the Defense Department run the postwar occupation, with its insistence on a “light footprint.” That, as former State Department senior adviser David Phillips said later, “was the first in a series of mistakes. The resulting postwar fiasco undermined U.S. interests and tragically betrayed the hopes of the Iraqi people.”
U.S. Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, evacuate a dead comrade during fighting with Iraqi gunmen as they tried to secure a key bridge leading into Baghdad on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, April 7, 2003. Laurent Rebours/AP
But the second thing was—and remains—the fierce sectarian rage that infuses so much of Iraqi politics. Long before I had met Lu’s family and his Marine Corps brethren, and heard about his idealism and commitment to a cause, I sat outside on a pleasant summer’s night in Baghdad, having dinner at the Palestine Hotel. This was a few months after the initial invasion. Saddam was gone, and the furies that would ensue had not yet commenced in earnest. The Palestine had a fish pond in the back, stocked with the day’s catch from the nearby Tigris River, and the hotel would grill what you wanted to eat. Guys out front of the Palestine sold cold beers, and this became a popular spot to eat for the journalists, diplomats, nongovernmental organization reps and spooks who had gathered in Baghdad in the summer of 2003.
One night, two gentlemen I had noticed before invited me over to their table for a beer. They introduced themselves as brothers, Kurds originally from Mosul. The Kurds make up about 17 percent of Iraq’s population and were brutally repressed under Saddam. The two men said they had fled Iraq in the 1980s and gone to the United Kingdom, where eventually they set up what became a successful software business. Now that Saddam was gone, they had come home and hoped to expand their business in Iraq.
After a couple of beers, I asked an obvious question. It seemed a little, umm, premature, I suggested, to be thinking of selling software in Iraq at this point, no? Things are, after all, a little chaotic. Well, the older brother said, we’ve also set up a “security company.” And what’s that for, I asked?
Knowing that I was a journalist, he replied, “Saddam in the 1980s had captured and killed our father, and he captured and killed our older brother.” He paused. “So,” he said, “we’ve put a team of people together, and we’re going to find the men who did that. And we’regoing to kill them.”
I’ll never forget those words. More than a decade later, the cycles of vengeance in Iraq have not been broken. The cost of the invasion to the United States—in terms of blood, treasure, international prestige and diplomatic clout—has been enormous. But the costs to Iraq are still mounting, horrifically so. The conclusion, as sad as it is inescapable, is that honorable warriors like Victor Lu died in vain.
Marine Lance Cpl. Victor R. Lu
Died November 13, 2004 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom
22, of Los Angeles; assigned to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif.; killed Nov. 13 by enemy action in Anbar province, Iraq.
Family provides biography of fallen Marine
Lance Cpl. Victor Ronald Huyen Lu joined the Marine Corps on Dec. 17, 2002, and graduated on March 14, 2003. His personal awards include the Purple Heart, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon and the National Defense Service Medal.
Lu’s family laid him to eternal rest on Nov. 26, 2004, at the Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood, California. Victor leaves behind his parents, four sisters and one brother.
Victor’s parents immigrated to the United States 23 years ago, and his father, Xoung Lu, served as a South Vietnamese soldier fighting alongside the Americans during the Vietnam War. Xoung, Victor’s father, has said that “Only someone very brave could do what he did.”
Victor had a loving spirit, shy charisma and compassion that made all of us love him —and now long for his existence. Victor exhibited his gentle compassion and integrity with his enthusiasm for life, and by always sharing his laughter and giggles with us. He always reminds us of the simple things in life and the rewards that we get from just living one day at a time.
Victor has always been active in serving the community. It was not a question of how to serve his community, instead it was always a question of when and what he could do for others by offering his time, energy, and strength in supporting his community and friends. Victor did not see it as an obligation to help others, rather it was his compassion and love for people — and the influence his parents had on him — that compelled him to serve others.
Victor also was part of the local Chinese Lion Dance Committee, and had performed at community events and festivals. Victor participated in marital arts as early as grade school. He had attained the black belt in Chinese Ju Si Tang Kung Fu by the age of 17. Mastering the marital art techniques served Victor well when he became a U.S. Marine.
He enjoyed the challenge and adventure that military life gave him, with opportunities to travel and see the world. He saw being a Marine not just as a career choice, but a lifestyle that came with the responsibility to protect and serve this great country and its people. He fought courageously on the frontline to bring freedom and peace to others.
We are extremely proud of our son and brother for the courage and patriotism that he demonstrated.
We will not forget what you stand for and the sacrifice you made for all of us. Victor, we love you and miss you. Until we meet again
— The Lu Family
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/04/americas-iraq-war-unravels-and-iraqis-pay-cost-256102.html
Lu would not return from Iraq alive.
In the early morning of November 13, 2004, the “3-5” was going house to house in Fallujah. When one front door jammed, Lu’s fellow Marines called on him to use his bulk and strength as a battering ram. He rammed his shoulder into the door, it popped open, and almost immediately Lu began taking fire from three insurgents inside. He absorbed eight or nine rounds before his unit mates could return fire. He slumped to the floor, mortally wounded. He was 22 years old.
President Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on May 1, 2003.J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The cost to the United States of the Iraq War has been immense: Between 2003 and the end of 2012, 4,486 American servicemen and women were killed. Another 33,000 were wounded. (Before that, in 1991, 382 American military personnel were killed in the first Iraq War, which drove Saddam’s army out of Kuwait, the neighboring oil-rich country to Iraq’s south.)
The toll on Iraqis has been far greater. According to the Iraq Body Count project, an independent research group that tries to monitor casualties, up to 114,731 Iraqis have been killed to date in a war that, for them, continues.
For the United States, the financial cost of the war was also enormous—and it still grows, despite the fact that U.S. troops are no longer there. According to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the U.S. spent $1.7 trillion on the war. That, however, does not include benefits owed to war veterans, including the long-term costs of treating servicemen and women for everything from physical wounds to post-traumatic stress disorder. Add those costs to the total and it comes to almost $2.2 trillion, according to the study.
There are still some associated with the Iraq War who argue it was not a mistake. In a different context, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the phrase “dead enders” to describe those defending the indefensible. Most now accept the obvious: “If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last, and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in,” said Steve Bucci, a former aide to Rumsfeld, last year. “Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought [the war] would be short.”
The consequences of that miscalculation have been enormous, and in many ways may have only just begun. America’s retreat in Vietnam nearly four decades ago begat genocide in Cambodia and an authoritarian, Communist regime in Vietnam that rules to this day. But in the wake of the war, economic growth in east Asia soared, and former authoritarian governments in South Korea and Taiwan became democracies (midwifed, to be sure, by active U.S. diplomacy, but not imposed at the barrel of a gun).
Now, by contrast, the Middle East has descended into chaos, with Al-Qaeda and its radical Sunni offshoots metastasizing and on the march, not just in Iraq but in Syria (where ISIS originated to fight the government of Bashar Assad), Libya and Yemen.
At the core of that chaos are the sectarian passions cut loose by toppling Saddam. Iraq is now at the center of a lethal Sunni/Shia divide, which sets Iran and its client states in Syria and Lebanon against not only radical groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula but also Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies.
Historians will long debate just how big an opportunity Iraq really did have starting in 2011, when the last of the U.S. troops packed up and headed out. Economically, it is true that there had been some progress. Blessed with massive oil reserves, Iraq had finally begun to exceed prewar production levels. But politically not enough had changed—as al-Maliki demonstrated almost immediately after the U.S. troop withdrawal by moving against high-profile Sunni politicians in his government, men such as Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, for whom an arrest warrant was issued within days of the U.S. troop withdrawal.
The U.S., exhausted and weakened by economic troubles at home, had no patience anymore for the constant head-knocking that Iraq’s politics require. And without a superior power knocking heads together, those politics quickly become lethal.
Lu’s idealistic notion that the Iraqis wanted and deserved freedom may have been true. But two things set Iraq on its current course. One, the U.S. government decided to ignore the detailed plans for what had to happen during the occupation, pulled together by the State Department before the war in the “Future of Iraq” project. Instead, the Bush administration agreed to let the Defense Department run the postwar occupation, with its insistence on a “light footprint.” That, as former State Department senior adviser David Phillips said later, “was the first in a series of mistakes. The resulting postwar fiasco undermined U.S. interests and tragically betrayed the hopes of the Iraqi people.”
But the second thing was—and remains—the fierce sectarian rage that infuses so much of Iraqi politics. Long before I had met Lu’s family and his Marine Corps brethren, and heard about his idealism and commitment to a cause, I sat outside on a pleasant summer’s night in Baghdad, having dinner at the Palestine Hotel. This was a few months after the initial invasion. Saddam was gone, and the furies that would ensue had not yet commenced in earnest. The Palestine had a fish pond in the back, stocked with the day’s catch from the nearby Tigris River, and the hotel would grill what you wanted to eat. Guys out front of the Palestine sold cold beers, and this became a popular spot to eat for the journalists, diplomats, nongovernmental organization reps and spooks who had gathered in Baghdad in the summer of 2003.
One night, two gentlemen I had noticed before invited me over to their table for a beer. They introduced themselves as brothers, Kurds originally from Mosul. The Kurds make up about 17 percent of Iraq’s population and were brutally repressed under Saddam. The two men said they had fled Iraq in the 1980s and gone to the United Kingdom, where eventually they set up what became a successful software business. Now that Saddam was gone, they had come home and hoped to expand their business in Iraq.
After a couple of beers, I asked an obvious question. It seemed a little, umm, premature, I suggested, to be thinking of selling software in Iraq at this point, no? Things are, after all, a little chaotic. Well, the older brother said, we’ve also set up a “security company.” And what’s that for, I asked?
Knowing that I was a journalist, he replied, “Saddam in the 1980s had captured and killed our father, and he captured and killed our older brother.” He paused. “So,” he said, “we’ve put a team of people together, and we’re going to find the men who did that. And we’regoing to kill them.”
I’ll never forget those words. More than a decade later, the cycles of vengeance in Iraq have not been broken. The cost of the invasion to the United States—in terms of blood, treasure, international prestige and diplomatic clout—has been enormous. But the costs to Iraq are still mounting, horrifically so. The conclusion, as sad as it is inescapable, is that honorable warriors like Victor Lu died in vain.
Marine Lance Cpl. Victor R. Lu
Died November 13, 2004 Serving During Operation Iraqi Freedom
22, of Los Angeles; assigned to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif.; killed Nov. 13 by enemy action in Anbar province, Iraq.
Family provides biography of fallen Marine
Lance Cpl. Victor Ronald Huyen Lu joined the Marine Corps on Dec. 17, 2002, and graduated on March 14, 2003. His personal awards include the Purple Heart, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon and the National Defense Service Medal.
Lu’s family laid him to eternal rest on Nov. 26, 2004, at the Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood, California. Victor leaves behind his parents, four sisters and one brother.
Victor’s parents immigrated to the United States 23 years ago, and his father, Xoung Lu, served as a South Vietnamese soldier fighting alongside the Americans during the Vietnam War. Xoung, Victor’s father, has said that “Only someone very brave could do what he did.”
Victor had a loving spirit, shy charisma and compassion that made all of us love him —and now long for his existence. Victor exhibited his gentle compassion and integrity with his enthusiasm for life, and by always sharing his laughter and giggles with us. He always reminds us of the simple things in life and the rewards that we get from just living one day at a time.
Victor has always been active in serving the community. It was not a question of how to serve his community, instead it was always a question of when and what he could do for others by offering his time, energy, and strength in supporting his community and friends. Victor did not see it as an obligation to help others, rather it was his compassion and love for people — and the influence his parents had on him — that compelled him to serve others.
Victor also was part of the local Chinese Lion Dance Committee, and had performed at community events and festivals. Victor participated in marital arts as early as grade school. He had attained the black belt in Chinese Ju Si Tang Kung Fu by the age of 17. Mastering the marital art techniques served Victor well when he became a U.S. Marine.
He enjoyed the challenge and adventure that military life gave him, with opportunities to travel and see the world. He saw being a Marine not just as a career choice, but a lifestyle that came with the responsibility to protect and serve this great country and its people. He fought courageously on the frontline to bring freedom and peace to others.
We are extremely proud of our son and brother for the courage and patriotism that he demonstrated.
We will not forget what you stand for and the sacrifice you made for all of us. Victor, we love you and miss you. Until we meet again
— The Lu Family
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/04/americas-iraq-war-unravels-and-iraqis-pay-cost-256102.html
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